Understanding Outtasking, Offshoring, Agent & Seat Leasing

You mentioned upwork and that's also how we started. Important distinction that I think most of you have is the difference between out tasking versus offshoring. The idea of out tasking, you go to upwork and you list a job and you explain it out and it's a one off type task. And sometimes there are going to be things like that, little projects that you might get done to test out different things and try different people. The biggest leverage comes from offshoring where you get a team member that becomes your dedicated staff that you onboard and they learn about your business. And that's where the real leverage comes from. By training them up and building out teams and getting all of your knowledge into a central place so that knowledge then can be transferred. So just something to keep in mind, you're really looking at offshoring a lot of your business and then, you know, tomorrow. We've touched on a few points today, but I did want to kind of just very clearly call out the three areas to think about when you think about different providers and what they're offering. We talked about the idea of agent leasing, talked about the idea of seat leasing and then potentially going direct. So when we think about agent leasing, we're talking about going through a bpo. They offer an end to end solution that includes recruitment, onboarding and ongoing management generally for that it's like the most premium solution. There are BPOs that will specialize in different industries and they can help recruit software people or salespeople or whatever. Or they might have general people like we'll go visit TOA tomorrow. And they specialize just in finance and getting bookkeepers for Australian based accountants. And so you'll see some different variations of this. Generally when it comes to agent leasing, they will have a, a price maybe that you pay per hour. Sometimes it's like a blended rate. So you don't really know exactly where the money is getting divided up between the staff getting paid and them taking their bit for providing all of the overhead that they provide. And when you think about pros and cons for agent leasing, pros, agent leasing is oftentimes very scalable. They're here, they've got recruitment, they, they know how to ramp up as you need things. They'll make sure they've got equipment and uptime with regards to Internet and power and they've got backup generators and they think through a lot of that. They're employing people locally so they handle healthcare or the 13th month they understand that Filipino culture. Oftentimes they'll do things to engage the business as a whole. Like, everybody that works in that BPO have things that bring the that company community together. And there are the downsides, though, and different variations and mixes of this. Like, sometimes these agent leasing BPOs aren't very transparent on how much your team members are getting paid. Some of them, and this is less common now, it used to be more back in the day where they might take as a BPO, 75% of what you're paying them and then just pay the staff 25% very little. And, and some of them, that's okay for them to take a portion as long as they're adding value. But there are some BPOs that don't continue to add value. I've seen BPOs where they continue to take a chunk and they've got someone who's working at home. They're not providing any infrastructure. Really. All they did was help recruit at the start. And now they're getting a piece of every hour that you probably want to redirect to the team member to get them more enrolled. And, you know, there's also other things when you go through agent leasing around, if you do want to break team members out of working through the BPO and go direct for them, they'll have like, costs that you will need to break, effectively the lease that you have with them to take the team member out. And there's sometimes additional costs. Like they'll have a deposit that you might have to pay up front, like almost like a security deposit. That way they can make sure that if you end employment and they've got obligations based on the government where they need to continue to pay them out over a period of time, they'll have the money in that security deposit to pay out whatever obligations are at the back end. So if you're just getting started, though, it's a great place because they can help take away some of the pain points of, you know, if you're first starting to work offshore, but you will pay a premium for it. So that's that one. Then there's seat leasing, which is kind of like workpob solution where. And some BPOs will allow you to have an agent and they might also have a seat leasing option. And that's where you'll pay a monthly fee for the use of the Internet and the space, and they'll make sure that the team member shows up and. But you deal direct with the team member and you're paying the team member. You know, maybe you're paying them through TransferWise or PayPal or something like that. And the seat leasing, what they'll do is they'll invoice you a monthly fee for just the portion that they're providing. And they might have an upfront fee for recruitment where you'll go to them and say, well can you help me recruit and place them? Then we'll put them in your facility and you kind of like stack these different fees up. But it's so many different flavors for how this can be done. So many different mixes. Everything's up for grabs and negotiable. So you're going to obviously meet some different providers to give you some ideas. But. And you've probably got an idea, Rodney. There's probably, I don't know, thousands and thousands of these providers. Yeah. So it's huge amount of opportunity and you're just going to get a little snippet of this and you'll end up finding your way. But the best way to find your way is to be here. Pros for seat leasing, obviously they provide the infrastructure. They can help you scale up and scale down. They can provide those recruitment services. Oftentimes they'll provide community related things and you know, building culture and things like that. Cons is generally you'll pay a little bit more. Not quite as much as agent leasing, but you'll pay a little bit more. But sometimes costs are hidden. Like you don't always realize that you might pay for seat leasing but they will make sure that the staff member shows up and then, or that the staff is doing work. So what might appear like you're paying a little bit more, you might end up saving potentially if you go direct and you haven't quite got your systems down and you can't monitor the performance of team members and you're not getting the output and it might look less on a dollar per hour basis, but from an output perspective you might have been better off going through a provider. So there's a few things to think about. Lastly, there's going directly you can find and start off based on upwork. That's where we start. Oftentimes we'll do that thing, we call it the three lancer technique where you post a little trial task and you recruit three people to do the same job and you find the one that stands out and you work with them, you know, just out tasking for a little bit. Do they show up? Are they on time? Do they deliver? When they say is their communication good? And then over time you might escalate and, and then you say to them, hey, really love Working with you, I'd love to offer you more secure work. I'll give you agreed hours and that way you don't have to go to upwork because oftentimes upwork a lot of those team members, it's a bit feast or famine, like they're chasing for the next job and that's not always great for security or if they've got dependents and things like that. So they might say, well, you know what, I'd love to. I've enjoyed working with you as an employer and I'm happy to agree. And oftentimes it's a lower rate because you're giving them the commitment of set hours as opposed to you paying them a higher rate if they're more like on a casual basis. So the things with going direct, obviously it's the best value for money because there's no middle man and you're going straight for the team member and you've got a huge talent pool that you can dip into and that's kind of when you open up the world. I mean, we just talk about the Philippines, but there's plenty of different emerging economies around the world and different locations have different skill sets. You know, we work with different software development teams out of the Ukraine and Eastern Europe is great for design and India has great talent over there and South Africa and like there's different places. But I think what I love about the Philippines is for all of the reasons, things like what Rodney had talked about, the culture, you know, they appreciate the work, they want to do the work, they're process driven. There's a lot of benefits for why we come to the Philippines, but the cons of going direct can be reliability and consistency. Not always necessarily.

The best output depending on how you're communicating. There's no real supervision. You've got the Internet and the power and the tech issues that sometimes you have to navigate and think a little bit about. I hope you enjoyed that clip. Just a heads up, it was a snippet taken from the Business Systems Accelerator program, which is the world's first training for systems champions to help you build a systems driven organization. If you'd like to find out more about the program, head over to systemology.com BSA and I'll see you in the next video.